[kaplunkett]

Hey,

I'm a Jaguar-using open source enthusiast who was, at one point in my life, an amateur interface designer (aka I've made and altered and ported a bunch of themes for AfterStep, FVWM, IceWM, Blackbox, Litestep, WindowBlinds...). Being so used to such liberal approaches to themeing you can prolly imagine how frustrating it is to be limited to being an "end-user" of other peoples themes because of my archaic OS and the proprietary software required to create themes.
Here's my question - Are there any ways to create or mod dltas without the use of ThemePark? I do have guikitty, so I am able to decompile and compile guikits, and I also have guikit2dlta so i don't have to worry about the format of the themes I DL...
Can I manually edit the source? Or does this require a degree in programming (I don't have that but I DO have developertools if that helps).

Help If you can. If not, maybe just point me to some Jaguar themes so I at least have some options...

[digitaljames]

To my knowledge, Themepark is your only option to directly edit and recompile in a usable format. Max has some Jag era themes still. Max Themes - Theme Library but Resexcellance is dead and with it a large repository of pre-shapeshifter themes.

[SpaceCat85]

A new version of Resexcellence.com has been "coming soon" for some time now, but if you use the Wayback Machine at archive.org you should be able to get at the old Jaguar themes they used to have up until a year or so ago, albeit slowly. They used to host all of their downloads themselves, so even if the original themers/websites/etc. are long gone the themes themselves should still be downloadable from the archive.

[kaplunkett]

Originally Posted by SpaceCat85 

A new version of Resexcellence.com has been "coming soon" for some time now, but if you use the Wayback Machine at archive.org you should be able to get at the old Jaguar themes they used to have up until a year or so ago, albeit slowly. They used to host all of their downloads themselves, so even if the original themers/websites/etc. are long gone the themes themselves should still be downloadable from the archive.

wow. that's a really useful tool. thanks.

[Brien]

Unfortunately, Themepark is basically it. All the other 'alternatives' are really either extremely outdated (10.0/10.1 theming editors) or dead (XTender, Themeshop, etc.).

You may want to poke around on here or the MT forums, I'm sure somebody has Jaguar themes lying around.

[eyevaan]

Would ResKnife be able to edit the resources?

[kaplunkett]

Originally Posted by eyevaan 

Would ResKnife be able to edit the resources?

looks like a good tool, but, again, I'm using Jaguar. But not for long. I think I'm gonna use my student discount and get Tiger very soon. I'm running into all sorts of brick walls when I try to get new software (and I'm an illustrator, so I have to have the latest releases...
Really it's a shame that the people at apple are such blatant capitalists that they charge an arm and a leg for what should really be a "critical upgrade". I mean, how can they call 10.4 the same OS as 10.2? I think they're too caught up in this X thing to name their realeases logically...

sorry for the rant...

[SpaceCat85]

There's also some security issues with Jaguar, like this lovely one left over from Unix's older days (definitely not exclusive to OS X): Effective password length of only eight characters

I agree with what you're saying, though. I've got a G4 running Panther, and Apple doesn't bother with compatibility updates like one to give Panther the ability to mount Intel Macs or drives with the new Intel partitioning scheme, even though it's just one release below Tiger

At this point, unless there's something critical you need in the next few months you might be better off waiting for Leopard to come out this fall. The bigger companies like Adobe tend to maintain compatibility with older OS X versions longer, but I can guarantee you from past experience that a lot of freeware/shareware developers will become "Leopard-only" just a few months after it is released.

[eyevaan]

That's a good point about the Dev direction. The IntelSwith is having sweeping effects on the programming community, the really big companies will attempt to get around the Rosetta issues and write pure Cocoa - the older systems will be abandoned except by the smaller companies who choose to keep their apps written in both.

@kaplunkett - Tiger was a significant step forward in the OS - I know Jag ran great and especially for some older machines, it was the solution. I could run it on an old G3 Beige box with Rage card but Tiger - well even with 600MB of RAM it did not like it much. I digress.
Check out an app called Resorcerer - I was running it for quite a while.
Question - Have you tried ThemePark? I totally respect the desire to use the OpenSource editing but TP is quite the program. The real benefit of using it is the way it organizes the resources so that, for instance, ALL the push buttons (Aqua, Clear and Graphite) are together in one set of windows and not spread out over the entire list based the on the numeric entry from the OS. Just a thought - contact GeekSpiff.com and see if he'll help you out with the older version.

[kaplunkett]

SpaceCat, I see what you're saying about leopard but there's also this to consider - The initial release is gonna be just as flawed as tiger was when it came out. And Adobe CS3 supports tiger and that's gonna be the standard for the next two years, so I think I'll stick with the stable, tried and true option for now.

eyevaan, Nope, haven't tried ThemePark... That's true, I should probably try contacting them. Does it only make guikits or can it also do dltas?

[digitaljames]

[QUOTE=kaplunkett;3380511Does it only make guikits or can it also do dltas?[/QUOTE]

Yes......